Putting a Hidden Help Section on a Web Page

Continuing in a series of posts, here's how to add a hidden div to a web page (and make it visible on demand).

For the health check report, I had built a way to transform the output of the script into a usable report and added editable content so that the report could be further tweaked after rendering the page. Given that others would eventually be using the report, I needed to add a way to help non-coders when inserting content into the report so that it looked cogent and coherent. Thus the help section.

However, I couldn't put a help section on the final report, that wouldn't look good when the report was delivered to the customer. So, I had to create a way for the help section to be normally hidden, with a button or link to display the help section. Also, the button had to be hidden!

Let's start with the help section itself. Take a look at the XSLT itself. The help section is simply a DIV containing the help content, with some special CSS applied to hide it until needed. Look at line 22. Notice that the display style is set to none. This hides the DIV entirely and collapses the space around it. It's as if the DIV isn't even there.

Now for a button to show the div when needed. Look at line 15 and you'll see an image with an onclick function. The function is contained in the external JavaScript file (lines 23-29). The JavaScript simply toggles the display style from none to block and back. Really, it wouldn't be too much to just put that function right in the img tag itself, but since I already had the external JS file, it was just as easy this way.

Another look at line 15 will show that the img is contained within a div with id="helptoggler". That div has three lines of CSS that essentially make it invisible until the mouse hovers over it and also puts it in the top left corner of the page:

1. #helptoggler {position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px;}
2. #helptoggler > img {visibility:hidden;width:32px;height:auto;}
3. #helptoggler:hover > img {visibility:visible;}

This means that the image is in the top left corner of the page, is hidden until moused over, and when clicked shows the help section.

Since the JavaScript is built as a toggler, the same function can be called anywhere a link is desired to hide the help section. Clicking on the image in the top left corner hides the DIV, but notice that within the help section itself is a span with an onclick action calling the same JavaScript function (line 24).

Once again, if you want to play with the files themselves, just download, unzip, and open the XML file in IE.